Beautiful One Day - Broken The Next
“Absolutely shattered” is just one community response to today’s public release of AusNet’s proposed Western Victorian Transmission line from Bulgana near Stawell to Sydenham to Melbourne’s west.
The 190km route was first made public to the media.
Member for Western Victoria, Bev McArthur, said for all the talk about community consultation – impacted locals clearly remain last on AusNet’s list of important people.
“This demonstrates that AusNet is more focussed on front pages and media spin, than the people whose lives and livelihoods they are about to change,” Mrs McArthur said.
The release of the corridor plan follows months of so-called ‘community consultation’ by AusNet – and independent public meetings by local communities.
“I have been to these meetings. I have walked the paddocks with impacted farmers. I have gone to the sensitive environmental sites and the forested areas.
“What AusNet has done today has eased few, if any, of locals’ concerns about the impact on their ability to work, and sustain industries, including tourism, along this high-wire project,” she said.
The devaluation of properties remains a problem despite an indication by AusNet that underground lines may still be investigated for some areas of the line.
AusNet’s Executive Project Director, Stephanie McGregor, has said the company will “continue to consult” and that “Nobody knows the land like the landholders themselves.”
It remains little comfort to locals, including Tourello potato farmer Katherine Myers through whose property the transmission line will go.
Mrs Myers told the ABC that “It’s hard to understand how they see it as adding value along the line when it’s clearly damaging tourism, agriculture and the property values of people that have made the choice to come and live out in these regions.”
Mrs McArthur said others, such as Darley residents near the Lerderderg and Wombat State Parks, are crushed by AusNet’s media-first approach.
“Despite discussion with AusNet in which residents were advised they would be the first to know about the final corridor selection, they have woken up to read about it in the paper.
“They cannot comprehend why this route has been taken. It defies logic,” she said.
Darley resident and member of the Darley Power Fight group, Darren Edwards, has written to me this morning and put it this way:
“Clearly working with AusNet on a collaborative level has done us no good. I cannot believe that Lily D’Ambrosio would announce the creation of a new Lerderderg-Wombat National Park and then allow an army of transmission towers to be built right alongside it, through one of the highest risk bushfire prone area of the state. And despite AEMOs recommendation that transmission lines should be routed away from bushfire prone areas to protect their assets”.
Mrs McArthur said she will now be working even harder to pursue the underground cabling options and a better solution for communities along the proposed route.
“This Government has proven its ability to ignore the rights of people right across this state. They have shut down democracy and dictated from on high.
“And here they go again.
“This project brings energy to the city’s inner suburbs at the cost of the country communities impacted by huge towers and transmission lines.
“It might feel good in Fitzroy, but it’s rotten in the country.
“We all accept the need to increase power supply with the forced closure of coal fired power stations providing base load power but we need to get the transmission infrastructure right for now and the long term and not just quick and cheap for the short term.
“These transmission lines will soon be criss-crossing the State, so this prototype has to be the best possible solution.
“All the media spin in the world can’t change the bleeding obvious: that country communities are being ignored and their livelihoods disregarded,” Mrs McArthur said.
30 June 2021